The notion of “improvement” as it evolved in the discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is inexorably bound up with the emergence of capitalism. While improvement in Ireland was intended to act chiefly as a catalyst for economic transformation, its implications extended to domestic and social spheres. The nature of British governance in Ireland saw the values of capitalism promoted as an avenue of moral redemption for a backward people. The far-reaching consequences of capitalism have been a popular subject of study for historical archaeologists given the multiplicity of its expressions in material culture (e.g., Leone and Potter 1999). These have ranged from architecture to artifacts and landscape organisation (Deetz 1977; Johnson 1996; Orser 1996). Of equal importance have been discourses concerned with the response to evolving conditions under capitalism by various strata of society (e.g. Beaudry et al. 1991; Hall 1992).
The aim of this paper is to attempt to detect the progress and features of improvement as experienced on an Irish island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rathlin Island is located some 9.6 km (6 mi) off the coast of County Antrim at the northeast extremity of Ireland (Fig. 1).
Regulators and governments around the world are rewriting the rules for the governance of corporations. Most of these initiatives focus on increasing board vigilance and minority shareholder protection. In the United States, these efforts have culminated in the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley act, while in the European Union this has led to the talk of a possible European code of conduct on corporate governance.
While some academic research supports the hypothesis that shareholder rights and board vigilance stimulate the growth of financial markets and economics (for instance, see La Porta, Lopez-de Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny (1998)), the hypothesis remains to be conclusively established. First, the ability of shareholder rights to explain financial market development in the time series is weak. In the United Kingdom around the turn of the last century a legal precedent, Foss vs Harbottle (1843) stripped minority shareholders of virtually all legal protection.
Rating agencies produce information about the risk of fixed income securities, however, the various ways the information is used by financial, legal and regulatory entities may potentially influence the nature of this information production. Bond ratings are not only used to assess risk, they are also used for certification, e.g. to classify securities into investment grade and high yield (i.e., junk) status.
These classifications in turn influence institutional demand and serve as bright-line triggers in corporate credit arrangements and regulatory oversight. For example, regulations may mandate banks and insurance companies to keep much higher reserve capital for high yield issues than for investment grade, where the level of reserve capital required goes up in large discrete increments depending on which side of the investment grade boundary an issue lies. The institutional importance of credit ratings to issuers and investors has raised questions about whether the current system provides the proper incentives to optimally produce value relevant information about risk.
